Clemens J. Setz - The rhetoric span between modernist dichotomies, scientific juxtaposition and postmodern play

Clemens J. Setz, Indigo. Trans. by Ross Benjamin, Liveright, 2014.




An eerie and uncanny mystery, reminiscent of early Pynchon, and the American debut of one of the most acclaimed young European novelists.
In the Austrian state of Styria lies the Helianau Institute, a boarding school for children born with a mysterious condition known as Indigo syndrome. Anyone who comes near them immediately suffers from nausea and vertigo. Clemens Setz—a fictionalized doppelgänger of the author—is a young math teacher who loses his job at the school after attempting to investigate the mysterious “relocations” of several children. Fourteen years later, Robert, a former student, discovers a newspaper article about Setz’s acquittal for the murder of an animal abuser. Could there be a connection between this story, which continues to haunt Robert, and the puzzling events of the past? DeLillo-esque in its exploration of alienation and anxiety, Indigo weaves together bizarre historical anecdotes, such as Edison’s electrocution of an elephant, with pop cultural marginalia and pseudoscience to create a “literary work that makes its own laws . . . rich in dialogue and variety, amusing and anecdotal, but also brutal and unfathomable” - Der Spiegel

Austrian writer Setz’s first novel to be translated into English is a complex, sometimes convoluted tale that incorporates elements of mystery, science fiction, and sociological commentary. His alter ego, math teacher Clemens Setz, interns at a school in Graz for children diagnosed with Indigo, a disorder that causes dizziness, nausea, diarrhea, and other symptoms in nearby people. Clemens soon notices that some children are “relocated” from the school, and he claims investigating their whereabouts leads to his firing—but suggestions of alcoholism and mental illness undermine his reliability. Fourteen years later, former student Robert Tätzel, whose Indigo has disappeared with adulthood, but who remains emotionally detached, becomes intrigued by a newspaper story about Clemens, recently acquitted of skinning a man who abused dogs. Setz creates a collage of history and anecdotes about medicine, animal experimentation, 20th-century exploration, and more, laced with pop culture references and supplemented with excerpts from classic works and black-and-white illustrations. This densely packed novel should satisfy readers who enjoy connecting the dots for themselves and following a winding path through a near future fraught with vague but urgent anxiety. - Publishers Weekly

In the northern part of Styria, Austria, lies Helianau, a boarding school for children suffering from a mysterious condition known as indigo syndrome. Everyone who comes to close to them is struck by nausea, dizziness and severe headaches. A young man named Clemens Setz who teaches mathematics at the school becomes aware of strange goings on: on several occasions he sees children in bizarre masks being driven off to an unknown destination. Setz begins to investigate the matter but he does not get very far before he is dismissed from his position at the school. Fifteen years later, the newspapers are filled with reports of a sensational court case: a former maths teacher has been found not guilty of brutally murdering an animal torturer.

And once more from the beginning. Forget about this plot summary of a novel that resists all summarisation, and just read the book: Indigo by Clemens J. Setz, the long-awaited novel by the author of the successful short story collection Die Liebe zur Zeit des Mahlstädter Kindes (Leipzig Book Fair Prize 2011, 40,000 copies sold). Devilishly exciting and as refreshing as a good massage. Afterwards you’ll feel every single muscle. - www.new-books-in-german.com/english/1249/355/132/129002/design1.html

The first thing you stumble on when you open Indigo is the plot summary. Being familiar with Setz’s brilliant volume of short stories, Die Liebe zur Zeit des Mahlstädter Kindes, I’d say this isn’t a bad example of what makes reading Setz such a gratifying experience: his take on the publishing world and what it expects of him, his take on readers’ expectations – we want to be entertained and soothed, reading should be like having a good massage – played out in jargon from the advertising industry. Words, put in a new context, that seem quietly unsettling. Setz’s semi-fake biography that follows interweaves real biographical facts with the plot of Indigo, a novel in which the main character is a mathematics teacher called Clemens J. Setz. Come on, Setz the writer seems to be saying­, this is fiction. I get to play here.
For those who haven’t read Indigo, it does have a plot that goes something like this: in a world set in the not-so-distant future, children are born with the Indigo syndrome, an illness that leaves the sufferers unaffected but afflicts those who come within close range to the victims with nausea, vertigo, and terrible headaches. The mothers are the first to be affected.  The result is that families break up.  Some of the children affected are sent to the Helianau Institute where they receive dubious treatment by Dr. Rudolph and his staff. Clemens J. Setz, a maths teacher who applies to the Institute for an internship, becomes aware of certain strange goings-on and starts to investigate. He gets embroiled in the dealings of the shady institute, ultimately having to deal with violent, physical attacks, among other things.
But all this is – almost ­– incidental. Indigo acts as a vehicle for Setz’s assortment of slightly geeky facts, a collection, as Setz’s American translator Ross Benjamin puts it, of “unusual anecdotes, neglected footnotes to historical events, cultural and pop marginalia, which he incorporates into his fiction as well as his public appearances and interviews.” Not only does this technique attempt “to do justice to the mushrooming information environment of contemporary life”, but it is also an “expansive sense of what literature can be and what can be literature.”
This does sum up rather elegantly at least one reason why anyone should grab Indigo and start reading. It is a challenge to keep up with what exactly is going on in this multilayered novel, whether Setz has chosen a metaphor for the way illness is secluded from society, is criticizing our treatment and responsibilities towards children, or, in Benjamin’s words, is reflecting on “a simple incapacity to get a complete handle on things that profoundly and uncontrollably destabilize our world.” Being a translator, Benjamin has clearly read his texts very closely and delights in the intertextuality of his writing, pointing out that Setz’s talent as a jazz pianist has perhaps made it possible for him move between narratives, doing more than one linear thing at a time, and yet giving the reader the confidence that he has the structural reins firmly in his hands.
Not that Indigo lacks pace. At times, you are deeply embroiled in the finer, nerdier details of Star Trek characters, and depending on your predilections, this may or may not do it for you. But at other times, the plot is downright gripping. Uncanny, as several characters say, in English. This is arguably one of the central concepts going on in Indigo: “the uncanny valley”. It comes up in one of a few conversations between characters and refers to “a hypothesis in robotics (…) When replicas of humans look and act almost, but not perfectly, like actual human beings, it causes a sense of revulsion among human observers.” (Wikipedia).
This is not the first time that I had the feeling while reading Indigo that I was being sent off to look something up on the internet. And that the result, when I found it, was both relevant to the characters, and relevant to my solving some mystery in Setz’s plot, but not in any obvious way. The internet, in my view, acts for Setz as a fourth wall, “a game he is playing between author and reader, internet and book,” as Benjamin says. As some general facts are cast in doubt – the world Indigo is set in has many parallels to our world but remains largely eerie and slightly off-key ­– so can other unusual theories have sudden prominence, even take up several pages or chapters of discussion. He eggs readers on to google certain words, giving them actual terms to look up, to question stories that you have no reason to suppose are not true. On looking up one story he quotes, I realised that he had interwoven the text you find at the top of google hits with his own make-believe.
In other words, Indigo’s arrangement is as much a comment on literature and communication as on illness, children, therapy or institutions that deal with all three. It is pretty unique. In fact, I’d go as far to say as there’s nothing to compare to Clemens J. Setz. In the words of Ross Benjamin, “He’s that rare thing, an original.” - Lucy Renner Jones




Just like watching the detectives.
Don’t get cute!”
It’s just like watching the detectives.
I get so angry when the teardrops start,
but he can’t be wounded ’cause he’s got no heart.
Watching the detectives.
It’s just like watching the detective
We not only watch the detectives but join them in this book ?
I have been vaguely aware of Clemens J Setz ,I had seen his name on a few German book prize list over the last few years , so when this book arrived from Serpents tail I was delighted to be able to try what seems to be one of the rising stars of German literature .Studied at Graz ,after university ,he went on and became a translator ,then a writer and poet ,his second novel the frequencies was on the German book prize shortlist (the German version of the booker prize ) ,he has also won Leipzig book fair prize .Indigo is his third novel and his first to be translated into English .This novel was also on the german book prize shortlist .A quick taster for German Lit month .
The wonderful inner peace , the first in a long while ,dissipated immediately when he stepped out of the building .Twenty-nine years on the planet and in all that time probably four hours altogether of perfect peace .During the years at Helianau it had been no more than three minutes , Not counting sleep
Robert tatzel just as he is set free into the world ,free from Indigo.
Indigo ,is a book with two main characters A maths teacher named Clemens Setz and one of his former pupils Robert Tatzel .The title refers to a kid that in 2007 appears in children that affects any adults that get near them with severe headaches ,nausea and vertigo .Clemens is teaching at the time when the children in his class that catch this Indigo condition.Clemens tries to discover what has happened to his pupils ,but is meet with brick walls and the loss his jobs  .They are driven of in a strange type of mask .Then a number of years later one of these pupils Robert tatzel who with age has grown out of the Indigo condition is reading a paper when he discovers that his former teacher Clemen Setz had been on trial and acquitted for a brutal murder .
Acquitted in a trial for the violent death of a man from Romania .Kept his dogs in a dungeon for years . severe abuse .Death by slow flaying .Prime suspect Setz free as of today .The family of the victim , a small picture .people standing there sadly .In recent years mainly a science fiction novels ,a turn away from literature .Currently living as a freelance writer near.
captions from picture Robert finds about his old teacher .
Now that is the basic story ,but this book is a wonderful German take on Post modern fiction , that through these two stories we almost join these two men as they try to discover what has happen in both case ,why were the children taken ? what cause the Indigo ? Why did Clemens Setz end up in a trial for murder .We meet a mix of files, letters, book reviews , news  stories , clippings and pictures  as the two men try to discover fifteen years apart what happen to the other ,almost like a snake trying to eat its own tail it coils and coils ,making this one of those books that is hard to pin down .It’s a real journey through it ,I was reminded at the times  of  writers  like Pynchon or even Perec  both of whom like Setz here tried detective fiction of one sort or another in their time . There is an inventive hand in Setz writing with all the documents letters etc add a dimension that I haven’t seen done as well recently Strene did it first and Dos Passos did it in his books ,even BS Johnson in some ways but Setz for me made this feel like I was detective alongside them ,I ‘m sure each reader like me has their own take on what happened and why because we can all read into what we see from our own lives ,this make this unusual and unique book and new voice in German lit . - winstonsdad.wordpress.com/2014/09/30/indigo-by-clemens-j-setz/



Apparently, books are supposed to be good for you. Between cardio and kale, scientists say, try thirty minutes of Camus or McCarthy. Late last year, writing for the New Yorker, literary critic Lee Siegel observed, “Perhaps it is appropriate, in our moment of ardent quantifying—page views, neurobiological aperçus, the mining of personal data, the mysteries of monetization and algorithms—that fiction, too, should find its justification by providing a measurably useful social quality such as empathy.” One study, organized by the (consciously liberal-arts) New School in New York, suggests that literary fiction in particular develops a reader’s ability to empathize with other human beings—perhaps, reports the Scientific American, because “Literary fiction . . . focuses more on the psychology of characters and their relationships.” And perhaps it’s true. Perhaps, after years of reading books no one hesitates to call elitist, pretentious, highbrow, difficult, and, occasionally, fancy, a person is more likely to consider another’s feelings before speaking or acting. But empathy doesn’t help me, per se, nor anyone else—why strive for it? Why set aside room in your heart for someone else’s pain on top of your own? In this sense, reading makes about as much sense as hoping to fall in love. But we do that, too, from time to time.
What drew me to Indigo, the newly-translated novel from Austrian wunderkind Clemens J. Setz, was its premise. Setz imagines an alternate dawn to the twenty-first century wherein a new medical condition is discovered: a congenital disorder that causes—in all those within ten yards of the afflicted—intense vertigo, nausea, and headaches. This condition, affecting a small minority of children all over the globe, tends to fade during late adolescence. The not-quite-PC term is Indigo children, coined from a misunderstood and far-from-scientific “study” involving a mystic, the imagined auras of personality types, and a blindfold test: “The seer, who was dressed like a bat . . . couldn’t for the life of her say what qualities that color represented, but she suspected it had to do with the coming of a new age . . . This experiment was somehow judged a success, at least the audience clapped enthusiastically for a long time.”  Indigo children, however mistakenly named, are from then on sought out at infancy, a parent’s every headache under suspicion, every sigh of fatigue analyzed for its cause. Since no one is able to withstand contact for more than a few minutes before vomiting or doubling over in pain, Indigo children are—in a depressingly familiar scenario—gathered up and confined to special schools where, scientists say, they’ll be “better off.” The absurd, deadpan history of Indigo sickness is typical of Setz’s novel, where arbitrary circumstances and emotional impulses have catastrophic effects on human lives.
One of these schools is the Helianau Institute in southern Austria, where the classrooms are vast auditoriums with ten or twelve students total, all spaced scientifically apart, and the living quarters are strange, shabby huts that dot the landscape. Because the children affect one another as well as adults, they have difficulty bonding even amongst themselves. From an outsider’s perspective, they appear almost nonhuman. Upon his arrival, the school’s new math tutor (and authorial doppelgänger), Clemens Setz, observes that they move “like wire models of molecules . . . always maintaining the distances between them, as if they were attached to steel connecting pipes.” Setz is hired at the institute right out of university, unable to land a job at a more conventional school. His nervousness is comical from the moment he arrives—the only uncertain, questioning, and empathetic being on a campus that seems populated by robots. The school’s principal, Dr. Rudolph, downplays Setz’s concern over the children’s welfare and isolation:

It’s not about subjecting the children to our understanding of proximity, but rather respecting their own. And that is, unfortunately, it must be said, truly possible only in institutes like this one here. Here they have a social structure they can rely on. A fabric in which they are embedded and . . . and it doesn’t unravel with the first little irritation.

That irritation, winkingly, turns out to be Setz, who despite Rudolph’s not-so-subtle warnings and double-speak begins to investigate what the staff refer to as “relocations”: the sudden disappearances of students who otherwise appear in good standing. Around Setz the narrator’s search and curiosity, Setz the author builds a novel of unique noir journalism, stunning prose, and compulsive readability. Indigo is stuffed (in the good way) with Tarantino-tinged conversations; cryptic news clippings with grainy, Sebaldian photographs to match; nostalgic TV references and Internet memes; epigraphs both real and invented; and a cast of twitchy, anxiously human characters woven into the “fabric” of humanity en masse, no more free to escape their respective prisons than Rudolph’s students.
Naturally, things don’t work out for Setz at the institute. In less than a year, he loses his job. He’s unable to forget the relocated children, however, and he begins to compile information on the Indigo phenomenon, the Helianau institute, Dr. Rudolph, notable Indigo children past and present, and historical data on other minorities and species that have been persecuted, exiled, confined, isolated, ignored, or eradicated. Interspersed throughout the novel are photocopied articles from newspapers and magazines, printouts from websites, and high-contrast photos as though taped to the pages themselves. Each is, ostensibly, some form of “information” deemed valuable and saved in the narrator Setz’s red-checkered folder, yet this information is little more than a catalogue of suffering. Even without Setz commenting on the articles directly—a write-up about the “loneliest telephone booth in the world” or the childhood isolation experiments of Dr. Harry Harlow—his presence is so frenetic that we can almost see him twitching, rubbing his temples at the senselessness of a species that seems only to want to cause its members pain, not to mention any higher being that refuses to intervene. Why, Setz wants to know, does the world happen this way? For what reason would something as terrible as Indigo sickness exist? In what world would a child biologically forced into solitude feel at home? In what world would he belong?  
Simultaneously, the novel follows Robert Tatzel, a former student of Setz’s at the institute, all grown up and “burnt-out”—which is to say, no longer symptomatic. Robert’s life is dislodged from its stasis when he reads about the acquittal of murder suspect Clemens Setz—indeed the same Setz whose brief term at Helianau Robert remembers quite clearly. In this future timeline, Setz’s guilt is almost certain, but without evidence, the brutality of his crime—“Death by slow flaying”—will go unpunished. So then does Setz the author set Indigo in motion, Setz the narrator in pursuit of the truth surrounding his former students’ fates, and one of his former students—fourteen years in the future—pursuing the truth surrounding his former professor’s crime.
At the point in Indigo where Robert reads of Setz’s acquittal, it’s no surprise to the reader that Setz’s victim was an animal abuser who “kept his dogs in a dungeon for years.” In the very first chapter, we learn that Setz cannot stand the suffering of animals. During an interview with a child psychologist—one of the first steps in his long investigation—Setz has what can only be described as an empathy attack:

She held the open book toward me. The picture showed a monkey in a box. The face contorted with pain. I turned away, held a hand out defensively, and said:

—No, thank you, please don’t.

She looked at me in surprise . . . I held on to the seat of my chair. [My wife] Julia had advised me in moments of sudden fear to focus all my attention on something from the past.

Setz’s attacks are numerous throughout the novel, whether they are crippling him as he delves deeper into the Helianau relocation mystery, or whether they’re simply recounted from the past during his brief career at the institute. In fact it’s an attack of empathy that leads Robert to remember Setz. During his first class, the new math tutor’s credibility is undermined by a photocopied magazine article left on his desk: “A picture showed a bee whose backside was destroyed. I read the caption. Bees don’t always die after they have used their stinger in defense. This bee lived for seven hours without its stinger.” Unable to maintain composure, Setz flees the lecture hall. It isn’t long before Setz, as he observes the way the students interact—including a form of bullying in which boys enter one another’s proximity circles to try to get each other to vomit—begins to view the students themselves as strange, helpless animals; especially the relocated students, who simply vanish from their rooms. Again, Dr. Rudolph warns against getting involved, against feeling too much. They are, after all, he explains,

children with limited social options . . . Truly remarkable and mind-boggling what situations human beings [can] come to terms with. We could even live deep inside the earth . . . in completely lightless circumstances, in areas with contaminated air and poisonous water, at polar stations in eternal ice, or in monasteries thousands of feet above sea level, where the oxygen content of the air was so low that everyone turned to God.

—Yes, eventually people will adapt against anything, said Dr. Rudolph.

Setz, however, cannot turn a blind eye to what he perceives as suffering. It should be said that the children’s preferred term, when suffering one another’s proximity, is to endure. “I’m enduring it!” shouts one student as he refuses to leave Robert’s dorm, as he reaches out to caress his skin. I’m enduring you, is what he means. That same student is soon after relocated and never mentioned again, one of many that Setz, years afterward, tries to track down. To endure—it’s hard to think of a more succinct synonym for love. Even the word compassion, at its twin Latin roots, translates to something like “to suffer with” or “to suffer together.”
Robert, too, has a strange relationship with animal suffering. Unlike Setz, Robert finds these images of pain, these stories of endurance, to be soothing. “Why was that so much more comforting than all the prayers and religious maxims he had heard in his life?” he wonders. At the Helianau Institute, Robert’s biology teacher feeds him “relevant material,” such as:

the story of Mike the chicken, who survived for a year and a half without a head, was fed by his owner with a dropper, and each morning, in a futile attempt to crow, squeezed air out of his open throat. With the story of the two-headed dog created by a Soviet scientist; of the transplanted head of a monkey that survived for several hours and asked for water by pushing out his upper lip in a gesture he had rehearsed beforehand . . . Of the peculiar coot that had been owned by a Russian noble and exclusively laid eggs with already-petrified, mummified chicks.

That Robert finds transcendence in the pain of defenseless creatures while Setz finds horror does not set the two men in opposition. In fact, when Setz admits that “Ever since I was a child, my sympathy with things and animals had been stronger than with people,” one can easily apply the same confession to Robert, who’s almost autistic in his dealings with other people and delights in making them uncomfortable. “You poor thing,” Setz seems to say, where Robert might only nod. Where Setz imagines the creature’s suffering, Robert understands he cannot perceive it. He knows that to suffer is to endure, and he takes comfort in proof that others can endure.
As a metaphor for aloneness and loneliness, it’s difficult to beat the eponymous Indigo sickness, an innate condition that precludes contact with others, that demands literal space between you and the next-closest person. So too does Setz the author imagine, beautifully, the way these children endure—their unique mixture of shouting and hand signals, their spatial awareness of those around them, their way of moving in sync like schools of fish or flocks of birds. What Indigo children first learn to endure is their innate aloneness, the hugeness of their own voice and imagination versus the literal distance of the people around them, not to mention the limited influence of their parents, teachers, and (if they have them) friends. With so much self in their lives, they get to know themselves. Yet the Indigo condition begins to fade with adolescence, an age where aloneness transforms into loneliness, and the children must learn to endure something far more challenging: proximity to another person, or what most call intimacy.
With all its puzzle pieces and mute sadness, Indigo begins to mirror the narrator Setz’s own hope for a pattern in the suffering, for order and justice. In the future sections of the novel, centered on Robert, the ex-tutor Setz is a broken, stuttering, nervous ruin of a human being, and yet still he obsesses over his red-checkered folder, feeding it as much information as he can find, while—in a green folder—he attempts to build a narrative around his search for the relocated children. Here the shady organizations, nefarious individuals, and corpora-military acronyms multiply, leading Setz further into the dark. “As soon as we discover a new animal,” he observes, “the first thing we’re interested in is the question of whether we can eat it. And with us it’s exactly the same. When a baby is born, people start thinking: What might it be good for? In what way might it serve me?” However brutal—however inhuman—all he wants is for there to be a reason, an excuse for all this pain. Indigo children exist, he wants to prove, for a reason; Setz himself, he hopes, exists for a reason. He cannot bring himself to understand that there may very well be nothing to understand.
All this ought to be a juggling act that should lead to an unreadable disaster of a novel, yet Indigo is crystalline in its clarity, hilarious and terrifying and deeply sad all at once, often in the same sentence. So too is Ross Benjamin’s translation a marvel, keeping the author Setz’s puns intact and his metaphors sharply, beautifully mundane: “Robert walked toward a bright restroom symbol at the end of a corridor. Here a fluorescent tube, probably years ago, had gone mad with loneliness. It flickered and buzzed in an incomprehensible medley of Morse signals, an erratic eyelid twitch. It had waited so long for someone to finally stand under it, and now everything pent up in it burst out at once.” One would think that Setz’s boyish penchant for absurdity and grandiose delusion, for indulging in Pynchonian scheming and Nabokovian wit, would preclude Indigo as novelistic art; but in fact it's these qualities and more that give it its life—because life is absurd and delusional, full of lies and confusion and moments so frustrating and cruel you can only laugh, else you’d collapse in despair. As with the best of novels, one can safely, sadly say, “It’s all here.” - Patrick Nathan


Jorge Luis Borges writes of a map so accurate that it covers the whole of an empire; by contrast, the Austrian novelist Clemens J. Setz writes in the hinterlands of verisimilitude, the area where the overlap between reality and fiction frays just enough to perceive a difference. Setz’s 2012 novel, Indigo, has recently been translated into English by Ross Benjamin and published in the UK by Serpent’s Tail and in the US by Liveright; to date, it is the first of his works to appear in English. Indigo is concerned with a condition known as the “Indigo syndrome”, which afflicts children: those who go near these Indigo children begin to suffer worsening and soon unendurable dizziness, nausea, and migraines, which are alleviated only when they return to a safe distance. There is some uncertainty in the novel about whether the Indigo syndrome is real, or whether it is an extreme response to the pressures of parenthood and modernity experienced as a sort of psychosomatic mass hysteria.
To further emphasise the novel’s sense of uncertainty, Setz has written himself into the narrative, much of which follows the attempts of a writer and maths teacher, Clemens J. Setz, to investigate the nature of the Indigo syndrome and the mysterious disappearances of Indigo children. Clemens J. Setz is, we are told, a murderer. He flayed alive “a man from Romania” who severely abused some dogs he had kept “in a dungeon for years”. Setz was acquitted of the crime, but not declared innocent (I think of The Trial: actual acquittal, apparent acquittal, or protraction). He makes a living now as a writer, mostly of “science fiction novels”. The reader can perhaps be sure that Setz, the author of Indigo, is not himself a murderer – although it is not unknown for European writers to write postmodern novels that reveal their own violent crimes – but it is otherwise easy to see the similarities between the author and his character. Setz himself even trained to be a maths teacher.
A second strand of the narrative, set fourteen years later in 2021, relates the attempts of Robert Tätzel to investigate the circumstances in which Setz was accused and acquitted of murder. Tätzel is a former pupil of Setz’s at an institute for Indigo children in the mountains, the Habianau Institute; he is now grown up and no longer suffers from the Indigo syndrome, for reasons that are not entirely clear – perhaps he grew out of it; perhaps Tätzel had been misdiagnosed; perhaps the Indigo syndrome never existed at all. Tätzel still retreats into the corner of the room when someone else enters, as he learnt to do as an Indigo child. Tätzel’s narrative is told in the third person, and there are hints that it might be the work of Setz, who is encouraged by his girlfriend to “pick one of them [the children at the Institute] and imagine how he’ll behave later on”.
The reality of each of the novel’s core components, then, is in doubt: the Indigo syndrome may not exist; the fictive Setz has a kind of ghostly half-reality; and Tätzel’s narrative could well be a fabrication. It can be difficult to build on such shifting and uncertain foundations, but this is of course the point. The reader is forced to focus on Indigo as a fiction and as a fabrication – but the effect, perversely, is not to call into doubt the fiction, but rather to call into doubt reality, or, more precisely, the ability to distinguish between what is real and what is fictional. Indigo suggests that it is possible for the Borgesian map of the empire to be so perfect that it covers the whole of the empire, but it goes further, suggesting that where there seem to be holes and tears and tatters in the fabric of the map there may in fact be holes and tears and tatters in the fabric of reality itself.
Setz appropriates real stories for his fiction as part of his strategy for defamilarising reality. (This is a strategy Setz also adopts in his poetry: he writes poems based on stories he has collected of bizarre deaths or based on reorganised text from Wikipedia.) These stories sound unbelievable, but turn out to be true. There is, for example, the story of a sword swallower from Bonn who “tried to swallow an umbrella [and] accidentally pressed the button that opened the umbrella and died,” which appears, after some internet research, to have verifiably happened (and not just once: there have been copycat tragic umbrella-swallowing incidents). Nick Richardson, reviewing Ned Beauman’s Glow, describes “a species of hysterical realism in which the world itself is shown to be so hysterical that it makes the most preposterous fiction look less unlikely.” Indigo is akin to this species of hysterical realism, but it is not preposterous: it is quietly strange and slightly unsettling. Its strangeness is realised in perception and minor details that, out of the corner of the eye, seem innocuous at first: “We turned onto a path that ran along the pond. On a meadow a few teenagers were playing soccer with an old black hat.” (This black hat, or at least a black hat, appears in a number of contexts in the novel.) “When we stepped outside through the door, I saw at some distance from the building two teenagers talking with each other. Like two land surveyors they stood facing each other and gesticulated.” In a classroom – and the classrooms at the Institute must be very large, because the students cannot get too near to one another without starting to feel ill as a result of the Indigo syndrome – there is a “pale female face in the highest row. She held little opera glasses up to her eyes, which made her feel incredibly elegant.”
As these moments accumulate throughout the novel, there is a growing sense that there is but a slight distance between the world as it is represented in the novel and the world as we might normally perceive it. This experience is likened to illness, which can itself defamiliarise the world, like a dream or a drug trip or being in love: “I […] suddenly know that I’m inside a migraine aura. It’s a strange world, a parallel universe, in which you can go through doors that are afterward no longer in their former place. You pronounce a word, and it’s the wrong color. Or you look at a tree and discover geometries in the arrangement of its branches.” This is a clever conceit because it happens to be quite true. Even a mild headache or a spell of dizziness or a stomach cramp can change one’s whole sense of being. Furthermore, it is clever within the context of Indigo‘s constant defamiliarisations: if the strangeness of fiction is the strangeness of illness, then it cannot be placed outside of any account of reality. Indeed, one German reviewer noted that “one can’t read the book without suffering an oppressive [beklemmend] headache”, giving the conceit a pleasingly concrete tangibility.
The similarity between fictional experience and the experience of illness, between the experience of reading the novel and the experience of having a headache, are important for the obvious reason that the novel is about a fictional illness. If we interpret the Indigo syndrome as a symbol of the experience of reading fiction, then we have to ask why we bother with it at all. Illness is not, after all, a particularly appealing metaphor, and the Indigo children are characterised by their distance and isolation. In answer, Indigo repeatedly suggests that the Indigo children might somehow benefit from their condition, that it might grant them a privileged perspective or an uncommon purity. This suggestion is mostly made by analogy. They are compared to steel from Scapa Flow, the site of the scuttling of the German fleet after the First World War, which is used to build spacecraft: “The rest of the steel in the world is – after Hiroshima, Chernobyl, and the numerous atomic bomb tests carried out in the earth’s atmosphere – too radioactive to be used in the production of such highly sensitive instruments.” Only this sad sunken steel can allow humanity to fly transcendently.
The Indigo syndrome might also, as the director of the Habianau Institute speculates, grant the children a resilience like that of Thomas Edison. The director details Edison’s failure to produce a talking doll using a wax record: “After it was played three or four times, the quality of the recording declined so steeply that the doll emitted only a horrible screech.” But, the director goes on, Edison wasn’t deterred: “He was fearless, really didn’t flinch from anything. In 1903 he killed an elephant from the Coney Island amusement park, an animal named Topsy, by high-voltage electrocution, in order to prove that direct current was better and more efficient than Tesla’s alternating current.” This success was cheered by a crowd of 1500; the elephant was executed because it had killed its trainer, who had been abusing it for years. Another sadness reimagined as a victory.
There are other analogies in Setz’s novel, far too many to detail fully here: the Indigo children might be like Kazakh mothers who want their irradiated children to have a high Geiger counter reading because they think the machine works by taking away the radioactive particles; they might be like a woman in Bavaria who is allergic to everything, and forces down food and medicine in agony three times a day; they might be like a rooster kept in darkness his whole life, which still crowed every morning, who one day escaped into the “brightness of the world, which his cells had always told him actually existed, and he hadn’t been able to believe it.” There is commonality to all these analogies. They are all part of Setz’s overarching strategy of defamiliarisation, and exist somewhere on the boundary between reality and fiction. They are self-consciously textual, and therefore marked as unreliable: the story about the steel is condemned by its author (a specialist on the Indigo syndrome) for being inaccurate; the story about the Bavarian woman is criticised by the narrator for being “sloppily and unsympathetically written”. And, most importantly, they are all tragic, and painful, and contain a glimmer of hope, no matter how obscured.
This glimmer of hope is empathy, a quality that Setz displays in abundance – for animals and people, for criminals and victims, for distraught mothers and even for steel that has lain on the ocean floor. Tätzel, the Indigo child, has this same kind of empathy, as does Setz’s fictional namesake, who writes:
Ever since I was a child, my sympathy with things and animals had been stronger than with people. Lost scarves wept all night in the darkness, a busted umbrella felt like a raven with broken wings and was inconsolable about the fact that it would never again feel the fresh rain on its stretched skin, a bee buzzing along the inside of a window longed for the air and the sun and the nearness of its colony, and a tree from whose crown an old Frisbee was shaken was sad about the loss of its toy or jewelry.
It is this sensitivity – a bout of unbearable empathy for some suffering dogs – that causes Setz to murder the Romanian man. We should not rush to embrace empathy, then: it is a glimmer of hope, but it is only a glimmer, and may well be mistaken. It is a means of dignifying and aestheticising suffering, a way of finding pity and beauty in cruelty, misery and decay. It is an illness – both literally and metaphorically – because it perpetuates suffering, but it is also a gift in that suffering can yield to a moment of pleasure before one’s death. Indigo offers two conclusions, then: that reality can be a kind of fiction, and that fiction can be almost unbearably sad. This is why access to fiction is characterised as a kind of illness, and why this fictional syndrome lies at the centre of the novel. Experiencing the fictive and the defamiliarised is unpleasant, disorientating, and isolating, but it can inculcate a kind of empathy, and with that empathy comes hope. Setz writes that the Czech poet Miroslav Holub “of all writers in the previous century – with the exception of Sebald and Kafka – is perhaps the one with the most strongly developed but also most idiosyncratic capacity for empathy.” He may as well have been writing about himself. - Timothy Kennett

An interview with Ross Benjamin on Clemens J. Setz




Clemens J. Setz, Sons and Planets (Söhne und Planeten), Residenz, 2007.

The Privilege of the Sponge

Clemens J. Setz and Metamodernism      

by Alexander Wolff 

In 2007 Austrian writer Clemens J. Setz entered the literary spotlight with a much appreciated debut novel. In four loosely connected episodes he transposed the peculiar and sometimes tragic relationship between fathers and sons into the astronomical and surrealist allegory of Sons and Planets (Söhne und Planeten, 2007, Residenz)[1]. The rhetoric span between modernist dichotomies, scientific juxtaposition and postmodern play has been Setz’s program ever since. As such it cannot be explained in mere postmodern terms but has to be viewed in a new way that in Setz’s case has to do as much with the ambition of the historic avant-gardes as with the insight into their irreversible descent into the museum of artistic movements. Setz shows that the historic development does not necessarily mean that contemporary literature is able to deal with pre-postmodernist concepts only by way of irony and the constant reference to its symbolic constitution and discursive strategies. But, on the contrary, to move beyond postmodernism we need to take a look at the basic goals and structures of literary endeavour and to relocate it in a broader context of a communicative act from which meaning can be gathered only in front of a painful but inevitable social horizon.
Lately, since the decline of l’art pour l’art and Walter Benjamin’s essays on modernism, observers of the literary scene have argued that we have reached a point at which artistic means have become accessible as such in their historic total: as a catalogue of devices aimed not only at delivering a message or making the familiar look strange, but also critically at the very constitution of art itself. From Robert Musil to David Foster Wallace, writers have made use of this in an elaborate fashion, laying out and transcending the social, mental and artistic inventory of their respective times. The literary genre of the novel, which was sentenced to death several times, remained the predominant vehicle for their general approaches.
The ambitious project of Clemens J. Setz shows that it still is. He sets out his own novelistic stance with an epigram taken from Robert Musil’s Man without Qualitites: “Anything permanent loses its power to make an impression.” The things that constitute the backdrop of our consciousness, Musil argues, are bereft of their ability to play a role on the stage of our consciousness. According to that basic guideline, Setz not only puts our quotidian reality into question, but the literary development of the last century and the recent permanence of postmodernism. Setz’s oeuvre is a poetological quest and the overt quotation of literary father figures like his famous countryman Musil is already a part of it. The young author is as aware of the hubris of that attempt, as the critique of the alleged lack of coherence and the essayistic and seminar-like character of his second and so far most important novel, The Frequencies (Die Frequenzen, 2009, btb), was harsh.
We enter the voluminous novel via the (usually blank) very first page and an entry in the fictional “Dictionary of Afterlife-Myths”. It states Setz as the author of the book at hand and, besides giving a basic inventory of the novel’s characters, it designates the novel to be “a huge declaration of love to the non-linear character of time”. Accordingly, The Frequencies bursts open the linearity of narration and scrambles its numerous episodes across 700 pages. Setz uses the alternating stories of two school friends that lost sight of each other, and the murder of a therapist in today’s Graz to re-evaluate from a post-postmodernist perspective the avant-garde’s ambition to defamiliarize the quotidian and to destroy the conventional or organic work of art: how strong do the boundaries hold between art and life today? Can you combine the spiritualism of the surrealists with the anti-metaphysical stance of the postmodern period?
While you would expect the reunion of former schoolmates Alexander and Walter to be the story’s point of culmination, and the murder to initiate a crime story along which the plot gradually unfolds, neither the two times when the two adolescents accidentally stumble into each other, nor the whodunit offer any key to the novel. Rather, coherence lurks in the side plots and conspicuously arbitrary knots by which the characters (and episodes) are tied together: the childhood of Alexander and the sudden disappearance of his father; the second marriage of the father decades later; the famous family of Walter imposing pressure through a stunningly contemporary imperative to be creative and become an artist, or if that does not work at least a journalist. Alexander begins an affair with the therapist Valerie, whereas Walter seeks help in her “Institute for Conduct of Life”, and instead of getting a treatment there, leaves to pursue a job as an actor in one of Valerie’s unconventional sessions. Here he meets Gabi who suffers from a neurosis that reveals its tragic effects by being passed on like a baton, evolving symbolically until it recurs as a metal bar with which Valerie is beaten to death.
Although all the episodes seem to happen accidentally, Setz is a meticulous mechanic at the temporal motor of narration. It is here that he skillfully loosens the screws and manipulates our perception while the novel, once its narrative fundament shakes, strives towards the limits of unity and coherence in an avant-garde-like fashion, setting in motion the relationship of its constitutive elements to the whole. At the same time the text reflects upon its precarious composition in a way that would by and large go under the name of postmodernism. The realm beyond the work of art, the truth behind its sentences and words, which for the surrealists was supposed to be unmediated life itself, remains within the narrative frame and is not simply there to be discovered by those sensitive to it – “be aware of storytellers”, one of the characters says after summarizing the story of Scheherazade. In the nonsense-apparatus of the “Rube-Goldberg-Machine”, Setz found a poetological concept that comprises both the avant-garde aesthetics of chance and subconsciousness aimed at an unmediated truth, and the postmodernist awareness of the narrative frame and discursive field. In combining both, Setz subverts the ways in which we make sense of the world, showing the major role narration and literature – be it modernist or postmodernist – play in that process.
Along the way, Setz manages to turn the concept of the novel inside out. The countless coincidences dissipate the narrative logic and point to a connection of the different elements that lies in the deep structures of the text. They take on the prominent role in the text. The hidden becomes the meaningful, while the meaning in the obvious recedes to the swampy lands of nonsense as soon it is looked at closely, or any explanation asked of it. Just as with the razor blade cutting the eye in Buñuel and Dalí’s Le Chien Andalou, in this novel we are confronted with a biting miniature horse or a painful solar eclipse. The text exposes the mechanism of literature in connecting disparate events in a reality that constitutes no meaningful whole – thereby also affirming Frederic Jameson’s axiom of history and its constitutive elements lacking any meaning prior to their textualization. Setz shows that it is us, in the process of narrating, who make sense of the events that have no obvious causal or logical connection – in the text as in our lives.
So far, so postmodern. Then what makes Setz’s young oeuvre go beyond? Many contemporary authors are masters in “surpassing each other in putting metalevel upon metalevel”, as the German critic Jörg Magenau remarked in 2011. In the end it is “nothing but a game that runs empty because it only aims at the text as a text and never at the society in which it emerged.”[2] In The Frequencies, Setz discards the endless play of self-referentiality as “a ghost writing: something that has to occur in every novel”. It has become a backdrop of our current situation that lost its ability to make an impression on the reader. At the same time, the historic example of the avant-gardes shows that we cannot simply discard postmodernism’s insights altogether. Instead, one could argue, Setz uses a metamodern strategy of oscillation between “a modern desire for sense and the postmodern doubt about the sense of it all”.[3]
In Setz’s prose, the notion of subjectivity is jeopardized in the face of a world that seems governed by chance; an overwhelming destiny that “plants its coordinates into the here and now and leaves us behind stupid, without any help”. In consequence, Setz uses his novels as an interrogation in the ways in which we still generate a coherent picture of ourselves and the ties to our environment. There is help, we could say in Setz’s terms, The Frequencies showing that we do not need to turn into helpless tragic figures like Walter, who struggle to develop an identity of their own. Rather it is a question of a consolidation of two sides. When Alexander remembers his childhood, he realizes his social side that longs for recognition, while at the same time an “earth turned away side” is further ahead and sees through the mechanisms of life. Alexander’s musings on how these two sides are joined together leads to the concept of the “as if”: “These two inconspicuous words, as if – maybe they were the keyhole through which you had to look at my life”.
While in Metamodernism the as if is turned positive as a way to accept the narrative character of history and still “progress morally as well as politically”[4], Setz shows the difference between the knowing inside (“that always was a bit cleverer than the visible side”) and the expression, i.e. behavior which is oriented towards society. In poetological terms, subjectivity in Setz’s novels is located between Brecht’s concept of “estrangement” (something Alexander had to learn in school as the text informs us) and Heinrich von Kleist’s “Marionettentheater” (“In front of whom should I have been ashamed, if my puppet theater [Marionettentheater, A.W.] was what everyone called Alexander Kerfuchs?”). While Brecht undermines cathartic effects by establishing a distance between actor and role, Kleist one hundred years earlier criticizes the self-awareness of modern man, who loses his gracefulness as soon as he recognizes himself as being watched. In other words, Setz’s concept of subjectivity is an oscillation between the acknowledgement of playing a role and a self-identical, immediate being. The social is Setz’s corrective here; in order not to turn away from the Other, individuals have to negotiate between their self-aware distance and a naïve grace in their longing for social recognition – echoing Vermeulen and van den Akker’s suggestion of the metamodern sensibility being an “informed naivity” and “pragmatic idealism”.[5]
Then what do we make of our current situation? How do we deal with the distance once established by Brecht and extended to the inevitable by postmodernism? For Setz it belongs to the overabundance of information and meaning the world has to offer. It leads in the wrong direction in a Nietzschean sense as pure knowledge. Setz, who began to make a name for himself also as a poet, seems to have an infinite source of analogies for this stance: Like a rainbow has many “sub-bows” in the ultraviolet and infrared ranges we cannot see, some birds can see these frequency ranges and “maybe that is the reason why so many of them lose their minds. Out of fear of that vast colorful spider web.” The title-giving frequencies, as Gabi illustrates in her vain attempt to identify the cause of her noise-neurosis, do not offer any meaning in themselves. Instead, Setz locates their significance in the space between two persons, where the medium still is the message, and a son can understand his mother just by the tone of her voice: “for any situation there was a particular pitch and in it the meaning was contained.”
The postmodern has shown the loss of a telos behind social and historic development together with the self-referentiality of any symbolic act. Setz knows about the ever-retreating chain of the signifier and a constructivism that seems to relativize everything once it enters the realm of language. The younger Setz finds poetic allegories and simple answers where the Setz of The Frequencies elaborates on the problem in narratological intricacies. The trick is to do it like the sponge in the puddle. In Sons and Planets, it says in an anonymous letter to the editor of a literary magazine:
The argument of relativity is strangely pointless to me. It might simply be a privilege that I assume, like I make use of my privilege as a Catholic to go in the cold in the earliest morning hours to the first mass. Or like the privilege of the sponge, that lies in the puddle and thinks it’s soaking with the clouds and treetops that are mirrored in the dirty water.
Simple is that. But for the sake of paraphrasing it: the possibility of transcendence refused by postmodernism lies within an individual pragmatism that turns the admittedly and a priori impossible into a privilege.
Under these preconditions, Setz can install the postmodern at the heart of his prose as one perspective of the “Möbius strip”, yet another concept in his cabinet of poetological figures. Like the two sides of subjectivity, literary endeavor can be seen from at least two angles that nonetheless run together on the möbius strip, that is non-orientable: as a questioning of the narrative generation of meaning and as a communicative act itself, art as an exchange between human beings. Setz’s metamodern quality lies in his ability to first make all the poetic devices accessible in their historic dimension, and second to refer them back to a social context in which they take on another meaning. They account for aesthetics as much as for ethics. In an award acceptance speech he says, “in a certain sense any literature consists of nothing but letters from someone misunderstood.”[6]
In all its plethora of reflections on literature’s proceedings, one of the novel’s successes on the rediscovered stage of our mind is its ability to illustrate family ties while directing our attention to the poetological connections between part and whole, sense and nonsense. The transparent structure of the novel, in other words, is one angle from which we look at the Möbius strip. Looking at it from a second angle, we start to fathom the hidden workings of familial relations: “the most extreme case of cling together, swing together”. Like the text is a mesh of hidden and overt narrative ties that holds everything together, “the family is a mesh within which everyone pulls everyone else down with him when he falls”, so it says in the second part of the entry in the “Dictionary of Afterlife-Myths”. With it the book ends on the (usually blank) very last page. That these ties do not account for a happy end, as the sinister rhetoric shows, is the result of a careful handling of pathos and an insight into the human abyss that keeps good family novels from being boring. It is that which constitutes the “steady background noise” of the novel. Setz’s project was to put these Musilian latencies on our consciousness’ agenda again. And it is his metamodern sensibility that, at the same time, gives us a glimpse of what a post-postmodernist literature could look like.

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[1] All quotes and titles in the text are translated from German, translation mine, A.W.

[2] J. Magenau: „Hier bin ich und leg dich flach“. In Süddeutsche Zeitung, 6.12.2011, P. V2/9.

[3] Notes on Metamodernism P. 6.

[4] Ibid. P. 5.

[5] Ibid.

[6] „Dankesrede von Clemens J. Setz“, in: Bremer Literaturpreis 2010, 26. Januar 2010, Rudolf-Alexander-Schröder-Stiftung, www.rudolf-alexander-schroeder-stiftung.de [28.7.2012].
-www.metamodernism.com/

 


This is why I read books, this is why I follow contemporary literature. Söhne und Planeten, Clemens J. Setz’ debut novel is stunning in its accomplishments, announcing the presence of a writer whom we will not hesitate to call ‘great’ one day. In 2009, Setz published his sophomore novel Die Frequenzen, a quirky, smart, engrossing read of a book, some 700 pages of writing that was both accessible and assuredly literary; it was also a long book overflowing with stuff that was maybe a tad less disciplined than one could have wished it to be, continuing an intriguing trend in contemporary German-language literature. If his second novel was indulgent and effusive, his debut novel is strict and dark. Although, as a whole, it merits being called a “novel”, it consists of four shorter novellas, each of which is taut and cunningly crafted. The novel is emotionally moving, yet almost blindingly clever in its structure and slyly original. It has not been translated, so far, despite what Conversational Reading‘s Scott Esposito sees as a good time for translation, and despite a series of mediocre German writers already translated. This is one of the best debuts published in German in the past decade, and Setz is shaping up to be the finest novelist of his generation, and one of the best novelists of these past years in German in general, with fellow Austrian genius Thomas Stangl (also untranslated into English, so far, see here my review of Stangl’s shockingly great third novel) and the German prose wizards Hartmut Lange and Marcel Beyer (Beyer at least has been, partly, translated. Don’t miss out on his work). Although Clemens J. Setz’ second novel is flashier and maybe even livelier, his first novel is a much better candidate for translation and maybe the better novel, as well.
Steeped in German and American literature, Söhne und Planeten is a largely realist chamber play, set in the reasonably well off middle class, and is based on the tensions inherent in many father-son relationships, something that connects Setz to readers everywhere, regardless of language and culture. The book’s basic references are to writers like Kafka, Ashbery, Bernhard, Delillo, Stifter, Turgenev and Handke, i.e. American writers and those well known and translated in the US. Few of its strengths are specific to its original language; Setz’ characters’ ruminations on writing and literature, their fears and neuroses, their difficulties as fathers, as sons, with each other; their failings as writers, as persons, all these would make immediate, powerful sense in any skillful translation, well, as far as anything in the book makes ‘immediate’ sense. Reading Söhne und Planeten, which literally means ‘Sons and Planets’, means reading attentively, re-reading even, yet the book is not difficult, obscure or forbidding in any way. Like the aforementioned Hartmut Lange, Setz combines cleverness and craft with an accessible, fresh and clean language. In Söhne und Planeten (though somewhat less so in his second novel), Setz writes with an amazing literary sophistication, slipping in and out of various literary voices and modes; at the same time, he never loses sight of the simple basic story he’s got to tell, of men and their fears. This simple basic story is conveyed with simple enough words, and the closer the novel moves to its emotionally bruising finish, the clearer the language becomes. This book would be just as impressive in translation; what’s more, unlike writers like Thomas Bernhard or Andreas Meier, this book could almost be viewed as bestseller material, despite its author’s obvious literary finesse. It’s an excellent book, and one that should be translated.
I already mentioned the fact that Söhne und Planeten is composed of four sections that could be seen as separate novellas. As a novel, the book is devastatingly coherent, revealing its overall concerns and ideas only slowly, yet each of the four novellas is extraordinarily well crafted, and each of the four novellas is vastly different in the way it’s made, from each of the others. There’s no repetition, no sentimental whimsy, each of the novellas’ means are perfectly chosen, each novella is perfectly placed. The first and the last novella are relatively straight narratives of young men, the first focusing on the up-and-coming young novelist René Templ, the last focusing on Victor Senegger, whose suicide prior to the events of the book cast a shadow over everything that happens within the novel. The two middle novellas are composed of several points of view, providing more complex narratives, none of which, however, lacks the tautness and discipline characteristic of the German novella (think of Zweig, Storm or Lange). Like a finely composed piece of music, Setz aligns all of his characters, their thoughts and actions in a music that rises, in the end, to a moving crescendo. The last novella, a coda of sorts, the most sentimental, the most unvarnished piece of the whole novel, turns out to be a perfectly fitting capstone to a book where everything really is in its right place. In the middle novellas, in many ways, Setz pays homage to the vast canon of modern and postmodern American literature, somewhere between early-ish Don Delillo and Philip Roth, but it’s really the first section/novella that shows us the way, although it turns out to have been the least characteristic part of the whole book.

That first novella, called “Kubische Raumaufteilung” (~ Cubic Room Layout), and presented with a prefatory quote by a “V.S.”, presumably Victor Senegger, is basically an exercise in angst-ridden soliloquy massively influenced by Franz Kafka, although the book doesn’t restrict itself to obvious influences or homages. It also contains both pastiches and long, extended quotes, sometimes from surprising sources. “Kubische Raumaufteilung”, for example, borrows from Kafka more than the surreal manifestations of its protagonist’s neurotic fears; it also borrows, inconsistently, his exquisitely simple yet literary language, sometimes offering almost a direct likeness of Kafka’s tone and his turns of phrase. All this is coupled with a narrator who is often coarse, desperately coarse, even. René Templ is a fearful individual, a young father, an aspiring writer, a husband who cheats on his wife with another woman to feel better about himself, yet whenever he feels pressured or afraid, he shrinks to the size of a child, or at least he thinks he does. Fear, another character says, later in the novel, is just another way to deal with one’s own body, just as Celine maintained (quoted by Setz) that philosophy is just another way to deal with one’s fear. Templ is obsessed with his own body and its inadequacies. He masturbates thoroughly, and his obsession with his genitalia and bodily fluids isn’t just communicated plainly to the reader, it’s also part of why he appears to be failing as a father and husband. Templ attempts to locate himself in his own body but he can only find decay, piss and blood. A writer, his mind is only as strong as the weakest part of his body, and as a result, his writing, at least the one small bit of Templ’s work we’re offered near the end of the second novella, is a gleaming but useless prosthesis, bereft of any muscle or genuine substance.
It’s only slowly that we comprehend that Victor is really the book’s central character, his absence an important part of three of the four novellas. In some ways, the first novella centers on René, the one character that, in a skewed way, has taken Victor’s place with his father, old Mr. Senegger; at the same time, René’s about to enact a relationship with his son that has an uncanny similarity to the one, we gather, Victor and his father had. The second novella, then, moves closer to Victor by focusing centrally on death and loss. The setting of that novella is a dinner party at the house of Ernst Mauser, a friend of Senegger’s and Templ’s, who’s recently lost his wife. Present are a handful of writers, including both Senegger and Templ. It’s the most complicated and elaborate of the novellas; each of its chapters offers, Rashomon-like, a different account of the events at Mauser’s house, in different genres, from a chapter written as an essay, to one entirely composed of letters. Not that really a whole lot happens, per se; instead, the novella, called “Fuge zu Ehren des Sonnensystems” (~ Fugue in Honor of the Solar System), examines the shape of loss in a writer’s life, and the impact this can have on the way he deals with his art, and with other people. It also helps us to better understand each of the other characters, especially Templ and Senegger, both of which emerge from this novella as somewhat farcical, tentatively ridiculous characters, both laughably self-centered and devoid of self-criticism. Additionally, the novella continues Setz’ interrogation of fear and masculinity. All this, while tragedy -and victor’s story- is waiting in the wings. But there is no pressure within the careful pages of Setz’ novel, no urgency in the narrative, nothing that really tells to reader what to look for, what’s to come; instead, we often seem to be led into a pointless exercise in cleverness.
Upon rereading, the dense novel yields its complexities in a way that might not be obvious to the first time reader. The relatively autonomous nature of the novellas, their self-contained arcs and structure can seduce us into reading them on their own terms, without the larger connecting context (although that does eventually become rather difficult as the novel progresses). The impression of largely pointless cleverness is exacerbated by the way that Setz uses quotes, paraphrases and pastiches of other writers, from various literary contexts. We catch a phrase from Pound’s Cantos here, a lilting note from Musil, a whole page from Defoe and much, much more. I’m certain I haven’t caught the half of it, but the fact of the matter is that the book crawls with these. And lists, of course. The best poets to read in the spring (answer, by the way: “Jaroslav Seifert, Vicente Aleixandre und Ezra Pound”), favorite novelists, etc. As it turns out, the novel uses devices like that in order to mirror the poetical principles of Victor Senegger himself, and towards the end of the novel, Victor Senegger, lover, friend, and suicidal son, bleeds into and merges with Victor the writer, and ways to write and ways to live become comparable and interchangeable, even. In all of this, if we disregard the odd Kafkaesque interlude, Setz’ book is solidly conventional realism. The characters and their neuroses are often derived from or references to stock characters developed in a century of psychoanalytically influenced fiction. In its long quotes and giddy pastiches, Söhne und Planeten is almost contemptuous of the idea of producing something original, in the Romanticist sense of the word. But contempt is too strong a word.

The fact is, Setz often doesn’t seem to care where, within the gay mirror cabinet of literary genres and traditions, his novel can or should be placed. It’s overt simplicity does allow for easy pigeonholing, yet it seems to me that any closer look, any deeper analysis (and I haven’t even mentioned in how many ways Setz takes up the novel’s titular planetary metaphor and what use he makes of it) makes any honest attempt to do so impossible. The most remarkable thing however, and the last issue I’ll mention here, is the place it has within the corpus of Austrian literature. When Handke, Bernhard, Innerhofer and the other great post-war Austrian novelists and playwrights emerged and became a viable literary phenomenon in the 1960s, quite a few studies and essays pointed out how their kind of writing was a kind of anti-Stifter literature, a new tradition opposed to the massive influence of that titan of Austrian letters, Adalbert Stifter. And indeed, one can place a great deal of literary Austrian fiction in relationship to Stifter, yet some younger writers, especially Setz, don’t seem to fit that mold any more. In passing, Setz demolishes Bernhard just as calmly as he rejects Stifter’s ideas of order. Söhne und Planeten is a marvelous novel, one that’s worth reading and re-reading. It’s not perfect, but for a debut novel, it’s absolutely dazzling. Clemens J. Setz proves himself to be a master craftsman, even though, when he published the book he was no older than 25. The novel’s scope is small, its focus turned inward rather than outward, its basic story swaddled in several layers like an onion. If Setz keeps up his craft, care and attention, and adds vision and scope, he will become one of the best Austrian writers of our time. His second novel, however, much I love it, is not exactly encouraging.- shigekuni